Oblivisci
by mayhit
Summary: The world has moved on. I will move on. I will move on better and leave it behind- I will not scream.


**Title:** Oblivisci

**Rating: **PG-13 (maybe)

**Disclaimer: **because I went to the 'Annual Actors Auction' and bought the whole set! - Not a chance.

**Author's notes:** if this plot sounds a lot like my other (shorter) piece Safe House that's cause it is, BUT! I can assure you that the two pieces are NOT really the same. Promise. Also I'm looking for feedback. Without it I get the impression the story sucks so if you thought it sucked then don't write feed back I guess (this isn't as insecure as it sounds :) and I NEED A BETA READER. if anyone would do the job I'd love you forever.

**Snip it: **the world has moved on. I will move on. I will move on better and leave it behind- I will not scream.

**Summary:** takes place some time after Almost Thirty Years. In this reality Vaughn drowned, Dixon turned Syd in and will's no "junkie" cause he's on the run too.

_**OBLIVISCI:**_

Sydney Bristow wants to kill Dixon. Now, here, in the blaring dark light of the living room television screen, and an uncountable number of times before now. Once for every time she's inhaled, once for every time she's exhaled. Once and once and once since the circumference- since he betrayed her.

_"I'm not looking for rhetoric, Sydney."_

And she wants it. Not because he's done something to her really. She does not want to kill him in the way she wants to kill Sloane. With hatred and anger that tastes like hard bluish metal in her mouth. She doesn't dream about killing Dixon, fantasizes about it, maybe. A poison in his drink, a gun to his head.

_"I hate you more than you could ever know"_

BANG.

When Sydney dreams she sometimes wakes up choking, already pressing her face into her pillow to muffle the sounds. Tasting salt. There is a man she dreams about. Every night, almost without fail, but he is someone else entirely (a handler).

Sydney never dreams about killing Dixon. Still, she wants to.

It's worst on the quiet days, nothing to do and a sink full of dishes, a house full of clocks and fragile porcelain figurines that smell like old dust and oily aerosol perfume.

This morning she woke up screaming, griping a gun that wasn't there and killing an enemy she would (hopefully) never see again. Remembering the whole dream start to finish the way that only someone who knows without thinking can every really do.

Briefing, prep, mission, debrief.

Briefing, prep, mission, debrief.

Her fantasies verge on reality. She can feel them when she tries.

During breakfast that morning she turned the burner up too high and her hands were shaking. Will talked while she flipped pancakes and he didn't say a word when they came out torn into sloppy halves, jagged little moons on mismatched porcelain plates.

Everything in this new house feels full of porcelain to Sydney. The floor feels breakable, the walls fragile enough that once, just after she arrived she'd put her fist through one, hoping only to feel it shatter. Then she remembered an old book she'd read, something about Midas and gold, and she decides it's probably her that's turned to porcelain. Everything else feels different; she has made herself a body out of glass.

_"I am fragile,"_ she thinks sometimes. She is so different from how she ever was; even will forgets to be careful around her sometimes. Reaches out to touch her on the shoulder, not anticipating her fear. Ends up on the floor, looking up and an angry black bruise on his arm for days.

_"If Vaughn were here,"_ she thinks, "_he would remember, perfectly."_

That morning they had eaten the sloppy pancakes that Will had refused (because secretly, she suspected he was disappointed about it) to comment on, and he had read the paper aloud for both of them to hear. Sydney always bought him a copy, remembering all the articles he'd written. He thinks it pleases her to buy them for him and she thinks he loves them, these things from his old life. This is a lie- a miscommunication. (She has decided there is a very big difference). He thinks about telling her sometimes:

_"I hate the paper. I want to set it on fire and watch it burn slowly- I want to cut into it like I was cut into _("_what is the circumference?_")- _Ruin every page."_

The newspaper reminds him of himself.

The first one she had bought him had contained only a blank space where his column should have been. He saved that page. Folded it with shaking hands (which he hated) and placed it into the inner lining of his suitcase (which he had always hated more).

The largish blank space filled a place inside him, a hollowed out pit that had formed after he had finished all his crying (at least the crying he would admit to) and found himself suddenly dehydrated.

_"Will, you look pale,"_ Sydney had said. Her face was white like dirty silver and she'd been losing weight already but he drank three glasses of water just to see the relief on her face.

She didn't look quite so pale when she smiled.

He didn't tell her about the paper with the blank space or the feeling of justification, a slight nod from the rest of the world. An acknowledgement of his, "passing". (He had always hated that word).

The arrival of the fifth paper brought, for the first time, not a blank space for him to cut out, (a routine he kept secret, he had collected all four of the previous ones)

But a small notice directly in the center.

_"We regret to inform our readers of the passing of Will Tippen, as well as to apologize for the absence of an article in this slot. Please be patient in out time of crisis."_

He read the concise typing nine times:

Regret. Passing. Apologize. Absence. Patient. Crisis.

It was a sad sort of occasion and will kept the whole paper this time because (he lied):

_"I really do love the article about shifting lunar cycles, I might as well."_

It was over a breakfast of under cooked eggs (Sydney had been dreaming about Vaughn, he was sure) and black coffee, (they were out of sugar) that on the morning of may the ninth the paper arrived boasting a brand new column.

_"I'm sorry,"_ Sydney said and offered to rip the page out for him so he wouldn't have to see. "_It wasn't their fault, they had to do something to fill the space."_

_"It just sucks," _will had said and left the table carefully, making sure not to make any unnecessary noise. After all, he was not a child; he did not slam doors or scrape chairs or scream.

_"I will not scream," _he thought and dug his nails into the wood of the doorframe. Then he carefully tore each blank article space he had saved in half and left the pile sitting atop the garbage basket beside his bead. It made his throat hurt to look at, though he frequently did. He liked to remind himself.

_"The world has moved on. I will move on. I will move on better and leave it behind- I will not scream."_

Everyday after that she brought him the paper, went so far as to request it for his benefit and he never said a word. He knew that she needed this, even if it killed him.

_"I brought you the paper."_

_"You're the best Syd."_

He dreams of telling her how much he loves her. He dreams of telling her all the things he's ever wanted to say and he dreams of kissing her (among other things). He does not have to feel guilty about this fact. He loves her and he is a man, after all.

So that morning they had sat, putting useless energy into eating burnt pancakes, and he had read her the paper. Only the funny articles today because by now, will knew when she would or would not have the stomach for drama. He could read the signs. Hollowed face, her eyes a darker brown and her shoulders up, meant that the funnies were going to be his main attraction. She loved the way he read them- just a tone off from his regular voice- each character a half a pitch separate. She called it a talent.

He called it an attraction.

_"Marmaduke, get of the couch!"_

She almost smiled, letting the taste of caramelized (burnt) chocolate chips melt over her tongue. Will liked them so she always put them in.

They do these things for each other. Her because she owes him his life back and him because he loves her without question.

And still Sydney knows that it's always worst on the quiet days.

The urge to do something, anything accept for stay here and do this. It makes her dizzy with pent up energy. Maybe pent up energy turns to rage, the same way that alcohol concentrated becomes a poison. Maybe that's why she wants to kill Dixon, wants to kill Sloane, wants to kill, kill, kill everyone who ever got the better of her and somehow led her to a small street in a suburban neighborhood in Ohio. Led her to a place where she can no longer cook things that don't taste burnt and she wakes up screaming, tasting salt in her pillow and wondering how long it will be before they've both had enough and decide to find solace in each other.

She has the sinking suspicion it wont be very long at all.

Will should be home any minute.

(She is poisoned with pent up energy) he is poisoned by her- dependant now. Without her he would die. Or rather, he believes he would and in believing it, makes it true.

She told him once:

_"Did you know that if you believe in something enough, you can help it become reality?"_

_"Really? What do you believe in?"_

_"Human decency."_

_"I don't believe in anything."_

_"You don't?"_

_"I'm a journalist, I'm supposed to be subjective."_

_"Nothing?"_

_"Maybe you."_

She had sipped her red wine and smiled. He sat silent, quite helpless, could only watch the light glinting off her pupils and is amazed at how little it took to fall in love with someone.

After breakfast he scrubbed the melted chocolate from the plates with a cheap plastic scrub brush (he cringed) and listened to the radio crackle, both of them lacking the energy to tune it properly. They didn't want to listen anyways.

Halfway through his third dinner plate, while he was shaking his hips to "I'm a slave for you" and dripping dish liquid foam all over the floor, the doorbell rang. Syd had answered it, her smile (the only thing that made his hip shaking, or anything else for that matter, worth doing) slipping from her lips. The ones that reminded him of rocky road ice cream and tequila and the licorice she had been eating the first time he had met her.

It was Jack who had rung.

_"All the paper work has been arranged, we've found a house for you in Mexico. You'll be moving in on Thursday."_

_"Both of us?"_

Will stood behind her in the hallway, feeling his socks sop up the warm moisture of the dish water, the air outside was colder that it should have been and he shivered at the contrast between hot and cold. He knew Jack noticed this too.

_"Yes. You'll live together. Your names are Jeff and Erin Morder. The rest is in here."_

He had handed them a thick file full of dry expensive paper, detailing their mission. Sydney's final mission.

Sydney felt the delicate chipped pieces (porcelain, remember.) inside of her break, the weight of the file making it impossible to breath, but she didn't say any of this to either of them. She could smell seafood blowing in off the night air and she thought about that.

_"When will I see you again?"_

To his credit, Jack looked unchanged, same old regret tinged with indignancy and sorrow.

_"I don't know Sydney. I'll be in touch as soon as it becomes a possibility."_

After he had shut the door she leaned against it, feeling her pulse in her neck. She smiled so that will wouldn't notice the change.

After the table was cleared away he claimed he had to buy worstershire sauce- an excuse to go down to the big buy on the corner and buy things with too much sugar in the ingredients list. He kept finding himself in the ice cream isle, his hand on the freezer door before he realized that the people who had fed each other ice cream- laughed and kissed, momentarily forgetting memories of dead fiancés and long due articles, were entirely different people now. Sydney and will technically no longer even existed. A fact that he regarded with careful respect.

_"I do not exist."_

He will say it a hundred times tonight, repeating the words until they blur into nonsense, never having really changed at all.

While he does this (contemplates ice cream flavors and abandoned kisses) she exercises until she can't breath and thinks about Dixon.

Three hundred sit ups, the tough kind, straight back, all in the stomach. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred. Feet bracing under her dresser, it will leave angry marks.

_"I will kill you,"_ she thinks for each time her back hits the floor._ "I will come back and rip your heart out. I will hurt you because it is only fair."_

Push ups, ninety-five.

Life isn't fair. She knows this as well but she has yet to accept it and so she imagines:

_"I will strangle you, not slowly, letting you gasp, but I will do it without doubt or grief for your loss. I will take your life away and I will say, 'I wish you hadn't done exactly the same to me.'"_

_"I'm not looking for rhetoric Sydney."_

Alone at the edge of the lake. She remembers how big her eyes had gotten. The life she could feel inside of her, reflecting off of them in the over ripe glow of the streetlights. He had looked at her and missed it. Believing that she could ever play the betrayer. Believing that she was a lier and a traitor of the country.

She imagines killing him, telling him, "_you were wrong and I hate you more than anything." _then she does one handed push ups until her arm goes limp and she crashes to the rough carpeted floor. The smell of vinyl polyester making her choke, as well as a vague scent of gun powder, hot and eerily familiar, no doubt dropped there by another agent, forced into hiding in a safe house that only had enough hot water for three quarters of a shower.

After Will is finished at the grocery store he walks briskly but aimlessly into town and allows himself a short afternoon of simplicity.

She doesn't know where he is, how could she? And it is the first time that he has failed to tell her anything in endearingly accurate detail but she swallows the rising taste of panic like bile and takes several (to many) Tylenol because she (feels scared) has a headache.

She gets an apple from the fridge, fruit being one of the only things she feels comfortable eating anymore, and enjoys the feeling of the knife digging into her thumb as she slices the pieces. Then she eats it slowly in delicate bites and fills four pages (both sides) with a letter to Vaughn.

She doesn't mean to but she can't help it. She is angry with him and she tells him so.

_"Its easy to talk to the dead (drowned), they'll never be hurt by the things you say."_

Without realizing it, she writes about the first time they met and subsequently about every time following that. She tells him that she hates him (he left her here alone) and that she loved him a little even if she shouldn't have and even if he didn't love her back (because, despite suspicion, she never did know for sure) near the end she even describes exactly what she was thinking in the moment that he first reached out, allowed an embrace. Pale silver sub basement lights making him just as beautiful as her.

_"Vaughn. I'm so sorry."_

Managing to miss her mother and hate her mother and miss his father and discover that she was in love with him, all in one instant. She writes this part simply, and at first it takes up very little room so she erases it and writes it again, bigger.

_"With you 'hate' was something curable. I loved you, for that and everything else."_

She supposes that if he were here now (instead of will) she might not be quite as skinny, depriving herself of everything in order to deprive herself of one thing.

_"I will take your life away. It is only fair."_

As quiet or as silent (two very different things) or as knotted or as angry. If he were here now, she knows he would hold her like they both wanted him to, so many times before (almost as many as she's wanted to kill) and he would show her how to keep her rage in her pocket, taking it out for reference as if it were a picture, hidden in her wallet.

Instead she finishes her letter (four pages is all the paper she has) with the one thing she has never said to him, out loud or in her head.

_"I miss you."_

She swallows salt, the hot sweaty kind that's nothing like ocean water, and signs her name. _Sydney Bristow._ The letters are stiff but precise. She is out of practice but she has not yet forgotten. One day she won't even remember how it was spelt.

This is the last time she will use this name.

When will gets home she has filled up another page. His cheeks are pink from the chilly air and his eyes even sparkle a little, or at least, she thinks, they don't seem as dull hollow as so many times before. It's 6:37 (she checked) and he looks guilty ("_sorry I didn't call, I just_...") but healthy. He has brought home bags, only the third time since they moved in and the first two times it was toilet paper (a desperate outing). When she feels him move towards her knowing not to bother asking her what she's writing because she hates to talk about these things, she doesn't jerk away wary, her paper pressed to her chest. Simply finishes the last line, one final time the M and the E curving together, a spider-webbed bridge between them.

She can feel him read it.

_"Dixon was my partner. I want to kill him. This scares me."_

The simple inscription is repeated 46 times (later, after midnight he will count them aloud to her). "_Syd,"_ he says but his voice cracks. Then he silently goes to the door. He picks up the first bag and puts it whole into the freezer (ice cream), then he presents her with the second. The plastic feels static-y and loose in her grip. She pulls it back but her fingers fumble uselessly. He doesn't mind. With his own hands (healthier now, having breathed in the world for an entire day) he easily pulls back the wrapping, revealing a photo of something long forgotten (by her).

Because it _is _her, not her now, but her a long time ago (less than a year ago), and not as skinny maybe, or as pale but surprisingly recognizable. Recognizable because there is a strength. In the picture she has red hair. Candy apple red, glowing neon red that remind him of the signs he saw in abundance on his one reckless trip to New York for the weekend. She is looking into the lense, the remnants of a scowl fading into a smile for the camera; she is everything at once, caught on film.

It was taken the day after she got back from Taipei. Nervously awaiting acceptance into the CIA and dreading going back to work (SD-6) on Monday. Looking back now, will should have realized that there was something different about her. The way she looked at him- talking as if she had a bit of a toothache.

_"Why did you need to borrow Amy's credit card?"_

She had looked at him and said only: "_come with me."_

When he asked her where she didn't tell him, when he asked her what for her reply was simple; "_hair dye."_

The rich brown liquid stung slightly on wills hands and they fought irritated over weather he had gotten it spread evenly, but once she was a brunette again he thought she seemed suddenly happier and he forgot all about the difference in her eyes, glaring and angry on that one fleeting day in September.

Sitting on the couch, Sydney looks down at the picture will has given her and doesn't move. For a long moment she just stares, not even blinking until she has to, to see properly. When at last she looks up at him her eyes are shining though she has yet to cry (that part will come later)._ "I kept it in my wallet," _he tells her and without thought or want of it, she feels safe.

When she stands to meet him, to hold him (he still does not get to hold her, she's too strong for that) he whispers, muffled into her hair

_"I understand."_

She knows that she owes him his life back. He knows that he loves her without question but it is already dark outside, the lamp not light enough to block out the indigo wash, cast in through the window. On the bed their skin glows incandescent blue, flashing with tiny bits of golden and it occurs to both of them that without the lack of sun, the hours of deprivation (on her part) and silence that gave cause for poor circulation, this effect would not have been possible. Yes, this is something new but it is not entirely solace.

On Monday they will move to Mexico where the thick manila folder has told them they will live in a nice house with a patio for having barbeques. They will cook dinner (and breakfast) and eat it together (chocolate chips in the pancakes). She will burn things sometimes, especially after she has had a dream about gunfire and secret meetings in a storage basement. They will call them selves Erin and Jeff and the world will forget about Sydney, forget about will. They will be sad and they will be happy and they will cry (later, after midnight) but they will not disappear entirely.

Will will not tell her how much he loves her tonight.

_"Without reason or question or thought."_

And if she ever tells him she loves him it, will not be for a very long time. He knows this, he has accepted it, for whatever it means.

He understands.

Sydney Bristow wants to kill Dixon.

But she wont. She'll even see him someday, maybe, retired on a beach in tacky Bermuda shorts and she will smile.

_"We are different people now and that was never your fault._

_I have forgotten what I have lost,_

(Her name, her job, Vaughn)

_I have forgotten what you did."_

(Accused her, killed her)

And she will say:

_"Hi, my name's Erin. It's nice to meet you."_


End file.
